This Story Will Make You Never Sleep in Your Contact Lenses Again

Seriously nightmare material.

Wearing contact lenses is incredibly common. Chances are most of you reading this might even be wearing them now in favor of your glasses. While they're are a great alternative for changing up your look, sometimes it's not always that simple. Melanie, an Iowa college student, was experiencing some light sensitivity and pain in her eye, so she went to the ophthalmologist. It was there that she learned she had a parasite living and feeding on her eyeball.

Yes, that’s right. A rare parasite was feasting on her eyeball’s host cells and causing the pain and light sensitivity she was experiencing. So what exactly was going on inside Melanie's eye? In a new episode of Monsters Inside Me, Biologist Dan Riskin explained, "What makes the Acanthamoeba parasite so dangerous is their ability to burrow deep into the tissue of the eyeball. Once there, they can be hard to remove or even treat, which allows the parasites to feed on the host's cells unchecked." Pretty scary if you ask us.

After visiting the ophthalmologist, Melanie returned to school and was given orders to apply a drop solution into her eye every hour, for four days. The solution, according to her doctor, was similar to commercial pool cleaner.

Melanie described the process by saying, “When I put the eye drops in, the pain it caused was just intense burning." She shared in the episode teaser. "It was an uphill battle, knowing at the top of the next hour you were going to have to do it again and having to set my alarm clock and get up all hours of the night. Just a continuous cycle of pain.”

To top off the horror story, Melanie woke up one morning only to find out that her entire eye, including the iris, was white. "It made me look possessed, and I was starting to lose my eyesight," she said. "The parasite was completely taking over."

The outcome of Melanie’s diagnosis can be found by watching her episode of ‘Monsters Inside Me’ on Animal Planet here. Just promise you’ll take your contacts out, okay?